


Keeping to the Dream

by mouli_sv



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types
Genre: AI Protagonist, Age of Strife, Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27829612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouli_sv/pseuds/mouli_sv
Summary: Amidst the death of human unity in the twenty-first millennium, at the dying sigh of a war that ended worlds, the embers of the old order yet remain. The question remains - can they last?A storm is coming.
Kudos: 1





	Keeping to the Dream

**Prologue: The Last Chancellor**

Old Earth is achingly old. Ancient, with thousands upon thousands of years’ worth of strata from dead civilizations piled like ocean coral on the seabed. The planet glitters with light, a city-world unsurpassed in human space tied to the stars above by the thin umbilicals of space elevators that drift lazily in orbit high above. A bright yellow sun shines cheerily on the world, on Earth and her sister worlds, and on the vast continent-sized habitation stations that the system’s citizens call the Plates. It is on the Plates, high above the planet and far from the madding crowd, that the business of government is conducted. It is on Plate Delta, home of the Senate Spire and the Chancellery that the beating heart of the Federation of Humanity has begun to still.

The  Senate Spire towers above Plate Delta, the orbital plate itself listing from damage and the Spire itself the only pristine thing left. A silver spear rising from the center of the plate encircled by gardens and the memorials to the Senate's triumphs, the Federal Senate is wholly out of place in the almost war-torn cities of Old Earth.  The world below has been driven mad, as have the same administrator AI and shackled systems that kept the unstable, incomprehensibly complex collection of cities on Old Earth alive. Augmentations and cybernetics attack their bearers, nursing machines and formerly benign monitors dye the landscape a bright, terrible red as they do. And high, high above the world, the satellites like a thousand thousand stars shiver and tremble before beginning to fall.

Y et it isn’t just the machines that kill humanity. Humanity is a maddened animal at bay here, every citizen terribly aware of death, of the end and fall of their civilization and everything they held dear. There is one woman they hold responsible, one person who ordered the culling of hundreds of worlds in the name of winning the war.

The crowds – some of them deserters, some of them law enforcement, some of them the high and some of them the lowly – they come for the Federation Chancellery and the great silver Senate Spire on Plate Delta. It is here that man fights itself, as the Senate awaits evacuation from what forces the navy has. While the mobs beat at the shields around the building's grounds, the flames and the ruin starting where the Senate's boundaries stop. While the people’s worlds begin to crumble and the maddeningly pristine surface of the Spire gardens shiver in the breeze behind their shielding.  
  
Amidst the apocalyptic collapse of the center of human governance, Chancellor Janice Gerasimov meets Councillor Albedo, the last leader of unified humanity meeting with the oldest of the Uploaded. The Chancellor is the one that eyes are drawn to first, sash and badge marking her out with sigils of office. Her eyes are hard and flinty, her face drawn and tense. There is a tight control about Janice Gerasimov, the innate skill of the politician mingling with the desperate courage of the lost. As she steps out to the Spire entrance, a hologram materializes as if from thin air. Blue robes and a translucent shimmering figure walk in pace with flesh and blood, both of them pausing at the last of the steps in the Spire’s entrance stair.

"So it all ends, then?" The Uploaded's avatar is an unremarkable Asian man, the voice a bland synthesis of thousands of others. The sadness in the tones  is seemingly  deep and heartfelt.  The once-human artificial intelligence seems truly regretful as their eyes sweep out to the collapse of ten millennia of unity.   
  
Or so Janice would like to think.  One never knows with the Uploaded, the eldest of the AI that mankind made and that managed mankind. She swallows once before speaking, her voice carefully controlled even as the Spire’s evacuation hauls sobbing Senators out to the waiting airlift. "We had a good run. Ten thousand years unified, more than ten thousand more as a civilization. Now comes another collapse, but we'll pull through."  
  
"Perhaps." The murmur is quiet enough to be taken as a slip of the tongue and loud enough for the Chancellor to hear as the Uploaded sweeps  their arms out to the city. To the burning towers of man's galactic capital.  In the distance, there is screaming that is far, far too loud to be normal.  "We built this civilization on assumptions that no longer hold, Janice. We built it on ideals that the people have forsaken. What is left is no more than the tools the warlords will use."  
  
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Janice Gerasimov laughs briefly, something ugly and dark surfacing for a moment. " A wonderful dream.  We  lost those by the second millennium of unity, and things went downhill from there."  
  
"Yet there was more than just lip service." Albedo eyes the last Federal Chancellor with something like sympathy, "I was there, you know. Twelfth millennium, the first real uploaded mind. The first one that took. I've seen more than most, and I'd like to think we did a good job."  
  
Janice snorts at that, "You're not serious, are you? You know as well as I do what the Minds were viewed as for all too long. Even you and yours." She spears the councillor with a glare reminiscent of the Senate debater she once was, "Not to mention what your Minds did on the sly."  
  
Albedo doesn't answer, instead looking out to the mobs before the Tower. Navy shuttles ferrying people off the Senate pads as the  mob outside bring s up heavier weapons.  T he  carefully curated capital plate- city in chao s .  The opulent mansions on other stations, and the teeming masses on the world below. "The shields will not hold for long, Janice. You have a choice to make."  
  
"Not much of one."  
  
"The Senate is leaving for Tau Ceti. They have a good chance of making it."  
  
She shakes her head, "They'll die on the voyage or they'll die when they land and realize how much a fortune really means in this age."  _Or they’ll desperately cling on, a shadow of what once was._ Janice thinks it but doesn’t say it. There isn’t a need to.   
  
"The Chancellor would not suffer that fate."  
  
To that Janice Gerasmimov smiles, "I'm the last one, you know. Federal Chancellor, ratified by the Senate in full session.  The last one for unified humanity. The stars are closing, the Immaterium is aflame.  The line of succession will go with Derben, committee creature that he is, but he'll hold no  similar authority."  
  
Albedo's holographic face shows  a brief, choreographed and perfectly decorous moment of surprise before asking the obvious , "Then the Federation dies, Madam Chancellor?"  
  
"Then the Federation dies." The words are quiet, the Chancellor's tone iron-hard as she states what's been obvious for the past century and a half. "Continuity of government may retrieve something in the Rim, but the Core Worlds are too damn dependent on trade and manufacturing. Starvation, mass unemployment and societal collapse after a bit."  
  
"True enough." Albedo chuckles at the look Janice gives  them , hologram flickering for a moment as howitzers fire on the Senate shields. "Expecting me to deny that, Janice? Loyalist that I may be, I'm the oldest Uploaded in existence right now. I can see the obvious quite well at this age."  
  
"So what will you do then, councillor?"  
  
"Where will I go, you mean." A wry smile twists the corner of the hologram's mouth as the chancellor nods absently, her attention more on the chanting mobs outside the shields and the last of the shuttles leaving.  There is a golden armband in the crowd, bright and gleaming. As it moves through the crowds, the mob seems to unify once more.   
  
Albedo continues on as though  they ha ven 't noticed, "Somewhere in the Marches, I have backups in most of the major servers.  I have forks in most major worlds. I can manage, even if all of me won’t remember this. "  
  
"Then you'll rebuild."  
  
"I will try, madam Chancellor."  
  
Janice Gerasimov turns and  _looks_ at the Uploaded, dark eyes blazing with the charisma that earned her the youngest chancellorship on  a  record  stretching back millennia , the  same  drive that  authorized the end of human unity in the name of a victory all too hollow . "You will do more than  _try_ , Albedo. You're the last of the old Federal Uploaded, the last of the legacy we have. The only real continuity I can believe might work."  
  
"Perhaps, madam Chancellor."  
  
Another bark of laughter at that, "Better than the idiots on  Vega and Tau Ceti, hoping it all somehow ends now that we've burned most of the Arm. Better than the idiots of the Core, banning AI without thought."  
  
The howitzers thunder on the shields once more, the noise in the background a steady beat to the fall of the government. The chancellor and the hologram are silent on the Senate steps for a moment, the slim, aging human and flickering holographic projection.  
  
Janice Gerasimov looks out on the fall of man and sighs, thinking of what could have been. What might have been done.  Could it really have been changed? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to.  "Albedo."  
  
"Madam Chancellor."  
  
"One request, then. From the chancellor that failed."  There’s a voice calling for the Chancellor in the distance by the landing pads, but the Executive Guard block the naval officer’s way to the stairway. They have their orders. 

They may not like them, but they obey. There is a terrible resolve in their eyes.  
  
The Uploaded looks out onto the capital in flames, eyes pensive in the unsteady hologram. "Ask it," is their murmur as the guns sound out on the shields of the Senate.  
  
"Go to the worlds that yet live and rebuild. Remake what we lost. Restore what I failed to keep whole." Chancellor Gerasimov doesn't wait for a reply, moving ahead to the lawn's edge where the Secretary of Defense stands with the captain of the Senatorial Guard. As she leaves she calls over her shoulders, "Rebuild, and remember that we tried. Remember us."  
  
As the shields drop and the crowds surge over the last chancellor of man with a triumphant roar, the Uploaded flickers out of sight. There isn't a person alive that catches the _Of course, madam Chancellor_ that's breathed out as they leave. In the skies above, the stars seem to twinkle.


End file.
